“Me too.” I smiled at her in the mirror and pulled off at the next exit with a restaurant.
It turned out that the three of them were twenty-one, so they were able to drink rum-and-Cokes while I nursed a beer as we ate burgers and fries, surrounded mostly by truckers. I wasn’t tired when Peggy started driving, so I sat in the other front seat. I thought I’d try to get to know her better, but found it hard to make conversation with her. I asked her about her family. Her father was a rabbi. That sounded so exotic to me. Her mother was a librarian, like mine, which finally gave us one thing in common, though that didn’t seem to impress her. Her mother probably worked at some huge New York library, while my mother worked at our little Round Hill library in a converted old house.
“Have you ever done anything like this before?” I asked.
She sighed, as if deciding whether or not to continue our conversation. “I worked with inner-city kids last year in this program that’s part of the War on Poverty, and that was okay,” she said finally. “But my father kind of talked me into this one. Though he wasn’t happy when David joined up, too.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, I assumed to see David.
I was stuck on the term “inner city,” which I’d never heard before. I guessed it meant the poor parts of New York, and I tried to picture my father actually pushing me into a program to register Negro voters.
She hadn’t asked me if I’d done anything like this before, but I answered the question anyway. “This is my first time doing something like this, myself,” I said. “I’ve done absolutely nothing. And now I plan to change that.”
Chapter 13
KAYLA
2010
I drive to the office Monday feeling even more anxious than I did last week. I actually case the main level of the parking lot for the red-haired woman before slipping into my usual spot and getting out of my car. I barely slept over the weekend, still trying to figure out what the woman wanted with me. Does she regret confiding in me? If she’ll murder one person, she could just as easily murder two. If the woman knows where my new house is—and she obviously does—does she also know that Rainie spends her mornings at preschool? Does she know where that preschool is? How the hell does she know anything about me?
I spend half an hour on the phone, trying to find a fencing company willing to run a fence between my thickly wooded backyard and the lake. It turns out, fencing companies are not crazy about installing fences through a wooded lot. I hear about copperheads and yellow jackets and the sheer misery of clear cutting a straight line for the posts. The one company that is willing has no openings for a month. I make an appointment with them to come out and take a look. Give me an estimate. Then I get off the phone and stare out the window for a while. I have never even seen the lake, it’s so deep in the woods. Do I really need to worry about it?
After work, I visit my favorite shop for window treatments in Carlisle, the county seat of Derby County, where all the good stores are. Amanda, an interior designer I’ve worked with often on my projects, gives me a bunch of catalogs and a stack of samples to bring home. Now I have an hour or so to myself before I have to pick Rainie up and I can’t wait to get to the new house and figure out how to cover all those big gaping windows.
I turn onto Shadow Ridge Lane to the familiar sight of white construction vans. Straight ahead, at the end of the road, I see our perfect house in its cave of green trees, but what catches my eye is that white sedan in the driveway of the Hockley house. A woman with short gray hair is lifting fabric grocery bags out of the trunk. I remember the welcome light in that house from the night before. On a whim, I pull in behind her car. She looks up, the bags weighing her down. I get out of my SUV and wave.
“Looks like you can use some help!” I call, walking toward her.
She smiles. “I can’t argue with that!”
I slip one of the bags from her arm and pick up the remaining two from her trunk, then follow her up the driveway, past Buddy Hockley’s blue truck and through the side door of the house.
I feel like I’ve stepped back in time. We’re in a kitchen, the wallpaper covered with faded images of rolling pins and sacks of flour. There’s a small white four-burner stove and an out-of-place stainless-steel refrigerator. The porcelain sink is huge. White cabinetry covers two walls and looks as though it’s been repainted a dozen times over the years. On the wall next to the door is a key rack that was probably made in a long-ago shop class. Three key chains dangle from it, the wallpaper worn away where the keys hit the wall. The kitchen is the antithesis of my shiny modern kitchen and it feels comforting to me. Something smells amazing in this room. There’s a slow cooker on the counter and whatever is in it makes my mouth water.